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Cloud Computing Democratizes Digital Animation
kenekaplan writes "John McNeil is the chief creative officer and founder of a digital arts and communication company based in Berkeley, CA. After turning to Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing service for the first time to finish animation under tight deadline, he was impressed by how it would let him compete with bigger studios. He said, 'Cloud computing is the first truly democratic, accessible technology that potentially gives everyone a supercomputer...it's a game changer. I could never compete or be able to deliver something at the level of a Pixar or a Disney, given what I have at my disposal inside the walls of the studio,' McNeil said. 'But if I factor in the cloud, all of a sudden I can go there. And then the limitations of whether or not I can deliver something great will be on my own talent and the talent of the people that are part of the studio.'"
"And then the limitations of whether or not I can deliver something great will be on my own talent and the talent of the people that are part of the studio." ... and also how much money I can put. Using a massive computing power on a cloud requires a lot of money.
No, it doesn't.
It potentially gives everyone who has enough money a supercomputer, meaning nothing really changes.
I doubt there is much difference between running your own computer or sharing a supercomputer that is roughly ten thousand times as powerful with at least ten thousand people.
Not to mention the bottlenecks caused by the internet connection you need to tell it what to do, and get what it has done back from it.
I repeat: NOT "convert buzz into something real". This was a demonstration project, if I understood the FA well enough. At most, it was a proof of concept. In and by itself, both the OP, the FA and AFAIAC the whole project are more buzz than real...although I would be glad to be contradicted with sound arguments.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
While what John is saying might be true for sheer brute force, it ignores many production realities, such as the need for immediate availability, precise compute time predictions and last not least data security - all reasons to run your own render farm. And if the talent really is at Pixar level, I strongly doubt that not having a render farm is a major issue.
Smaller productions might benefit from this and be able to produce longer animations in higher resolution with brute force global illumination techniques, but I doubt it will do anything at the Pixar/Disney level he is referring to
If there was ever a site which was in jeopardy, it would be slashdot. Why is Slashdot not participating in the SOPA blackout? Does this mean that Geeknet Inc is a SOPA supporter? Please can we have a statement.
Compute resources don't come for free, you pay per use. You'll only be able to harness the Cloud if your business is sustainable. But if it is, then you could afford to buy compute resources anyway -- albeit in a smaller fashion. The only real difference is that with cloud services you can save some money if you don't run jobs 24/7.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
And then the limitations of whether or not I can deliver something great will be on my own talent and the talent of the people that are part of the studio.
Oh yeah, I suppose, there'll be some cash needed to pay for all that compute time to render it like the big boys. Great big stinking wads of cash. But yeah, it's totally levelled the playing field now.
*rolls eyes*
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Mister John McNeil
the chief creative officer and founder of a digital arts and communication company based in Berkeley, CA
I'm dying to see his business card.
After CA thing he should add usa. CA thing is located in usa?
You could hire computing cycles for a long time, there have been companies hiring out temporary server hosting, for however short or long as you want for decades... and of course for the really old, hiring a certain amount of performance on a larger system is exactly what mainframes were about.
Of course, it has become easier but that is because computing has come down into the general market of the last few decades. More people can now afford computing in general including buying access time on mainframes, oops the cloud. It isn't the cloud doing it, it is that computing is simply becoming cheaper and cheaper. That CPU power on the phone in your pocket once would have set you back a small fortune in rented time on a university machine.
But surely it being cheap, it means it is now available for all... eh no. If you want to create a Pixar like experience you still need to spend a small fortune on renting either a server farm or renting access time on "the cloud" or buying your own server farm.
Because here is the clincher, the cost of computing has gone down but the demand for computing has gone up. Every new movie Pixar releases raises the bar, forcing anyone who wishes to compete to rent even more computing time to keep up (because god knows, trying to figure out just why Pixar releases awe inspiring movie one after another beyond sheer computing power is far to hard).
So little bobby with a budget of a 100 bucks is still not going to be able to make the next Pixar movie... unless of course he simply renders it on his and his friends PC's for "free" and pours instead his heart into it that made the lamp animation that can now easily be done in realtime on a modern PC still look damned fucking good...
The cloud wants to be payed... and the nature of rendering means that while the cost per unit might go down, the amount of units needed goes up.
It as with running a website, everytime there is news your home connection might soon (but never where you live) go up to being fast enough to serve a real website, the demands for a website go up and you still need a fucking server to run one. Just check the size of even a text only site like slashdot now we are all on 100mbit fiber (why not damn you!) vs when we were all on dial-up.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Then I agree with you?
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Everyone is not able to get a super computer, chances are pretty much zilch, this article is a bunch of crap.
I'm just curious if you render a few frames and show your peers if you can get SOPA'd.
This democratising of computing ability makes content creation within the ability of anyone with the (extreme) talent. This explosion of content and weakening of the grip of big media is what is being fought.
And it will only get cheaper. No wonder they are fighting it. Ironic that they are using a provision that was originally designed to encourage creation!
I am wondering more and more whether the concept of copyright is suitable these days.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Does the CEO realizes that he's trading CPU's limitation against bandwidth's limitation ?
Generating a picture in full HD requires 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels.
But for a movie, the resolution is 4096 x 3112 = 12,746,752 pixels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution
This gives 36 megabytes per picture.
Now, you have to create 25 pictures for one second.
You get 5400 megabytes for every minute of movie.
It may be faster to compute digital animation, but you still have a large IO problem, both in storage and in preserving the data (you may lose pixels when downloading the files) !
It's similar to outsourcing tasks: it's a short-term solution for larger problems.
Slashdot should be down 24 hours to protest SOPA PIPA. Slashdot SUCKS !!!!
don't confuse c(r)apitalism with democracy!
To show how a laptop unleashes human creativity, the guy tried using 8 of them and failed, then had to use a server farm.
Offtopic: I hear Amazon pretty much every time Cloud is mentioned on /. is there a deal between them or am I making connection where there aren't any?
Well, you still can use lossless compression like PNG on that 36 MiB image. That would cost some CPU time extra, but not to the extreme.
If you render it in the cloud, who owns your 3D models and data?
Or more accurately: who has access to your models and data?
Word up dude. Cloud services do not "democratize", they "make more affordable" and so they simply increase the number of players. Much like the hosted web server decreased the entry barrier for publishers and journalists without making the blogosphere anything like a democracy.
Studio Pyxis (www.studiopyxis.com) is a Burbank based production company that is taking full advantage of cloud computing, both for our own productions and for sharing with clients. The company is a new model of production company leveraging years of development in real time technology such as the Virtual Production process used on Avatar which involve real time graphics and visualization so that directors can shoot visual effects interactively as if they are really happening in front of you, and cloud computing that can complete the photorealistic renders on the back end in record time.
One feature of cloud computing that is often over looked though in these production discussions is the breadth vs depth computing model. It's obvious that it's a value to have a massive cold room that you don't have to buy up front, but the real advantage comes when it costs exactly the same thing to run 1000 cpus for 1 hour as it does to run 10 cpus for 100 hours.
Visual effects and animation production is all about revisions. It's a huge win to have your full renders back sooner. Being able to run every frame of a shot at once regardless of how many frames you have means that you have the entire shot in the time it takes the longest frame to render. This has never been possible before. Production has always wanted a dynamically scalable solution but as always had to contend with some fixed capacity. Granted EC2 has a fixed capacity as well, but it is so much more massive then a typical production facility as to be a non issue.
As for what some commenters are saying about bandwidth issues it is true it's a factor, and this is why it's not a turn key solution for the average small company. We've spend a fair amount of time creating an infrastructure that mirrors assets in the cloud, renders and composite locally to the cloud, then generates compressed images and movie files for download at review. Only when we approach the completion of a shot do we download actual exr, or dpx data. But we do make our infrastructure available to other companies to help them be more turn key.
Another aspect that more then democratizing cg production actually gives an advantage to the smaller facility are the limitations that larger facilities working on mainstream studio pictures have such as MPAA rules about keeping film assets off the internet and/or on physically disconnected machines. Whereas small facilities like ours can be satisfied with a VPN connection to Amazon, larger facilities are often legally obliged not to.
The one area that still needs to be solved to truly make this work for everyone is for the software companies to start offering the same type of pay as you go licensing so that we can more easily use the professional tools. It would be relatively easy for a company like Pixar to offer a RenderMan license server that one could connect to over the internet or even EC2 based that would monitor your hourly usage. Are you listening Pixar?
You kids nowadays keep saying "democracy" but you really don't seem to know what it means.
Some issue that they can exploit to shut down small studios use of cloud computing. Oh...they will. As soon as it becomes monetarily uncomfortable.
You forgot to factor in the cloud.
Great ad for Elastic Compute.... where is the actual newsworthy part?
If I'm afraid you're going to "compete or be able to deliver something at the level of a Pixar or a Disney", couldn't I just get your ISP to block you off from the cloud because I don't feel you're doing enough to prevent Pixar/Disney intellectual property from being incorporated into your work?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
As i run computing cluster 3947 in the cloud you used to create your digital animation, I claim copyright for part of your digital animation.
I'll expect my royalities check every month until copyright expires.
Or i'll use the new copyright laws to shut you down for infringing on my copyrights.
I actually did the same thing for some projects I was working on... used Amazon's EC2 as a Maya/3DS Max Backburner renderfarm. I posted some tutorials on how I set it up on my website: http://www.judpratt.com/tutorials/ec2-renderfarm/
EC2 let me render in 5 hours what would've taken my own computer about 110 hours to render. The cost came out at about $.06 per core hour. The commercial cloud renderfarms charge about $0.75 core hour for comparison.
Web hosting that doesn't suck!Dreamhost
turning to [prominently mention service name] for the first time [sure it was] ... it's a game changer [excellent use of PR speak]...that gives everyone a supercomputer [if you can affort it]
I'm sure it lets you breath water and gives you telekenesis too, but we don't need to do Amazon's advertising for them, they're big boys with deep pockets.
Commercial render farms have been around for years, long before "cloud" computing. Search for "render farm" to find some of them. They compete on price, so the pricing is good. The concurrency generally consists of running one frame on each machine, so the intercommunication during rendering is zero. Pixar was doing this by 1995, using a set of shell scripts called "Ringmaster" to push the data around. If the CEO of an animation house just discovered this, he's way behind.
Rendering isn't the bottleneck on cinema projects. People are. Look at the full credits at the end of any modern animated production, and watch as a thousand names scroll by. There's an army of people drawing background objects, landscapes, crowds, and fine detail. That's where the cost goes.
It hasn't improved much in the last decade, either. A decade ago I knew a director who'd done some feature films with mixed animation/live action, and he was hoping the technology would get the cost down, so he could do a feature for $20 million instead of $80 million. A decade later, budgets for A pictures are up, not down. "Tangled" came in at $260 million. Which is why what gets green-lighted is usually a known franchise.
If you're willing to drop to video game levels of quality, animation can be really cheap. See Next Media Animation. Fastest production house in the world.
Bingo!
Liz Phair - Exile in Guyville
Buying is generally cheaper than renting if you have enough work to justify the cost. If you only need a supercomputer for a short while, renting is more cost effective. You must not ignore the profit motive. The cloud provider will be charging their customers, collectively, many times the cost of the hardware, labor, and energy required to make the system run. From TFA: 'In contrast, the upfront cost of building an in-house render farm can seem astronomical. "With just eight machines, you could be looking at $50,000," said Kuchta. With only four big projects a year, he said that kind of investment might not be fully utilized.' I'll bet that if they were doing 4 big projects a month, that render farm would start looking cheaper and cheaper.
If they're an animation studio and all they have is 8 laptops, I think they have bigger problems.
Sure you could call up 300 cpus to do the rendering. But don't most commercial renderers charge by the core? I don't imagine open source renderers are competitive with commercial ones.
ICGAAD (I'm a computer graphics animator and director). I own a very small animation studio and right now I'm using as many computing resources as can get, this means using my small renderfarm, own pc, some friends' pcs and even a couple of Ubuntu One servers.
But in the case of big projects I cannot use the cloud, I cannot even tell my friends what projects I'm doing. Big clients require secrecy and very tight controls to avoid leak of any information. So maybe if you're working in your own pet project or small job, yes, the cloud may be a solution.
We used spot instances for most of the project, averaging a bit more than 50 cents per hour. Spots are great for rendering because we didn't mind getting outbid - we'd just do that frame again. The hard part was writing the script that tied it all together.
This was a demonstration project...I would be glad to be contradicted with sound arguments.
Have you seen our work? Prepare to be "glad." http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/home-users/unfold-whats-possible.html I'm rather proud of it. Those four vignettes were rendered in one week, which is the point of TFA, but it was months of blood sweat and tears. The cloud just made the deadline possible.
That's what we used for this project. Luxology gives you 50 render nodes for each license of modo, and we had 6 licenses, which allowed us to legally render on 300 machines. I don't think any company comes close to Luxology when it comes to licensing. They license to people, not nodes. And you can't beat the modeling and rendering tools. We animated in Maya, but refused to use Mental Ray for rendering. Renderman is great, but the per-node price is a killer. The star of this story is ec2, but without modo it doesn't work at all.
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So I guess "democratic" means "relatively cheap and easy to use" now?
Duly noted.
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'